Faced with this inconvenient truth the President is now falling back on the same failed Keynesian models that betrayed him the first time to make the case that the recession would have been even worse without his policies. So last week on The View President Obama told Elizabeth Hasselbeck: “There was a report that came out by a couple of economists just today, including John McCain’s former economist, that said that had we not taken the steps that we had took, you would have actually seen millions of more jobs lost and we would be in a Great Depression.”

Then on Friday, President Obama repeated the same line to CBS News: “John McCain’s economist from the campaign, estimated that if we hadn’t made the decisions we’ve made, you would have had an additional eight million people unemployed, and we would be in a Great Depression.”

The President is referring to a computer simulation run by Mark Zandi, who was on a list of then-Presidential candidate John McCain’s “advisory committee of economists”, and Alan Blinder, who served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. Their unpublished working paper is very similar to the Congressional Budget Office reports which, while they claim the stimulus “saved” 1.5 million jobs, the CBO has admitted are “essentially repeating the same exercise” as their initial projections.

Commenting on the Zandi paper at his blog, Stanford University economics professor John Taylor writes:

I have now had a chance to read the paper and have more to say. First, I do not think the paper tells us anything about the impact of these policies. It simply runs the policies through a model (Zandi’s model) and reports what the model says would happen. It does not look at what actually happened, and it does not look at other models, only Zandi’s own model. I have explained the defects with this type of exercise many times, most recently in testimony at a July 1, 2010 House Budget Committee hearing where Zandi also appeared. I showed that the results are entirely dependent on the model: old Keynesian models (such as Zandi’s model) show large effects and new Keynesian models show small effects. So there is nothing new in the fiscal stimulus part of this paper.

I do not think we will ever know what would have happened to the economy without the fiscal stimulus and the large monetary interventions. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of economists would agree that we will never know the answers to those questions. However, in the competition for public attention, Blinder and Zandi have two advantages. First, they support a narrative in which government experts did the right thing, which is comforting to government experts and all who believe in them. Second, at a tactical level, their use of an esoteric computer model along with those two decimals of precision, they intimidate journalists and other laymen.

How about my model? It involves not putting a coat of paint on failed structures and calling them safe. There are no private corporations too big to fail, only those that need to restructure per free market rules.

for the president to state "if you have a job today, it's been "saved" implies no job would've existed if it hadn't been for him. that's just pompous and ignorant. It's government intervention that continues to destroy economic freedom. He claims there's been a gain in the "private sector." A gain of private sector once independent, now holding the hand of obama? Or a true gain in economic freedom?

He threatens by, "not helping the states, they would be forced to remove public protection and safety?" These areas should never be considered, but THREATENED to decrease or remove, as States should always rid "special interests." to sustain the government's only rightful duty of protection and safety to all citizens. No tax dollars should go anywhere else.

Until every penny is paid back from the incompetent industries obama couldn't wait to help out, without the consent, but of other peoples earned money and no government hands are held, there is absolutely no profit of worth.

If America STILL has the best workers, technologies, universities then why is government intervening? Causing higher costs, complications, and confusion?

because Joy behar can't open her mind to anyone else's views, I don't go out of my way to watch "The View."

I'm an engineer, and it appears to me that these guys could not pass a fundamental economics class in college. Maybe they have other goals?

Well, if George Soros promoted the administration and their cronies, they are doing a good job for him in his bet on the collapse of the dollar.

I should not say "if," because he has promoted them and given them his

considered advice. He is an icon for the Socialist International and their boot-lickers in the House of Congress: the Democratic Socialists of America. They are Marxists. It smells highly of un-American activities.

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